The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Texas youth coaches learn from rugby
Sport’s tackling technique has proven to be safer.
ARLINGTON, TEXAS — Raymond Kitchen had other places he would rather have been than in a big, empty football stadium at 7 a.m. on a Saturday. But there he was, three days before Christmas, with 450 other high school football coaches, attending a two-hour lecture on tackling at AT&T Stadium, the home of the Dallas Cowboys.
The lecture was a part of an ambitious effort to have all of the state’s 23,000 junior high and high school football coaches become familiar with, by August, a program that teaches rugby-style tackling. It emphasizes the use of the shoulder, not the head, in bringing down the player with the ball.
The program was created by Atavus, a company based in Seattle that says it can produce more effective tacklers by teaching defenders to square up before hitting a ball carrier and to use their shoulders and legs for leverage and power. Coaches like Kitchen seem receptive to the message Atavus is trying to popularize.
“It’s where to put your head that is the focus now,” Kitchen, a defensive coach at James Bowie High School in Arlington, said after he finished a written test that was a part of the certification. “Every year, with CTE, every coach is now, ‘Get your head out of it,’” he added, using the initialism for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head.
From the viewpoint of the Texas High School Coaches Association, any program that might reduce the number of head injuries in football, and the apprehension that they create, is worth looking at — even if the program is inspired by a sport, rugby, that is much more prominent in other parts of the world than it is in the United States.
“The most important part of it is getting moms to realize that the game is safer than it probably ever has been because of coaches’ awareness of concussions and all the things we’re trying to teach them, and because of the tackling training that’s coming on board,” said D.W. Rutledge, who retired recently as the executive director of the Texas High School Coaches Association.
Rutledge and the coaches association have tried to reassure skittish parents by adopting rules that govern when players can return to action after a concussion and also limit the number of full-contact practices. Now they have turned to the rugby-style tackling program in their latest, and perhaps most elaborate, attempt to convince skeptics that football can be made safer to play.
Rutledge and his second-in-command, Joe Martin, started searching for tackling programs about two years ago, concerned that state legislators might call for further restrictions on the sport. The most wellknown tackling program was one designed by USA Football, which is funded by the NFL. But its emphasis was primarily on youth football.
Rutledge and Martin wanted something that addressed older and more powerful athletes, and they were impressed with Atavus because of the dozens of techniques it uses to teach defenders how to approach ball carriers and bring them down.
Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, has promoted “hawk tackling,” which borrows heavily from rugby. But Atavus, which works with coaches at Ohio State, Michigan State, Rutgers and other colleges, also uses video to analyze and rate tackles as well as identify additional drills to address deficiencies.
In seizing on rugby as a model, Atavus chose to highlight a sport in which tackling above the shoulder is not permitted; some players wear “scrum caps’’ but none wear the hard plastic helmets used in football; and the rate of concussions is lower than in football, according to Dawn Comstock, a sports injury epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health.
Rex Norris, a former football coach in Texas who helped develop the tackling program for Atavus, which is called Tacklytics, knew some coaches might be suspicious of techniques borrowed from rugby, and consider them an attempt to soften the way football is played, even though rugby is a physical sport played by burly athletes. So he started his hourlong presentation last month with a blunt proclamation:
“We believe in tackling the legs,” he told the coaches. “We believe in body-on-body contact. And we believe in knocking the runner backward. We know how much this game is changing, and as coaches, we have to continue to change. We have to continue to change how we think, about how we practice.”
Norris spoke to the coaches as a peer. But a part of him was akin to a physics professor trying to translate complex equations into simple concepts. Being an effective tackler, he told those at the seminar, was not just about bringing down a ball carrier, but about maximizing one’s power and control. To tackle effectively, a defender must take the right angle to the ball, face the ball carrier and use his legs, hips and shoulder in concert.
Rodney Webb, the coach at Rockwall High School, about a half-hour’s drive from Dallas, started using the program in 2016. While his players quickly learned the drills in practice, their results during games did not improve until the second season. In the season and a half since then, the number of missed tackles fell 30 percent during games, Webb said, and his varsity team had no concussions in the most recent season.